Your choices:
1 Process heat/steam (50 - 150 °C); 2 Biomass (digestible sludge); Fuel: gaseous
| What is your resource? | What do you want to deliver? | What is the service the customer wants? |
| 2 Biomass (digestible sludge) | District cooling | Comfortable indoor climate |
| Biomass (fermentable sludge) | District heating | Electricity |
| Biomass (solid) | Electricity | Process cooling (< 0 °C) |
| Geothermal | Fuel: Gaseous | 1 Process heat/steam (50 - 150 °C) |
| Sunshine | Fuel: Liquid | Process heat (150 - 1000 °C) |
| Water | Fuel: Solid | Process heat (> 1000 °C) |
| Wind | Local cooling (ind. house) | Transport |
| Residual oils/fats etc | Local heating (ind. house) |
If digestibles are the selected as the resource, the energy carrier will by necessity be a gaseous fuel.
Supplying biogas in sufficient quantities for industrial applications can only be done by injecting properly upgraded (i.e. SNG, substitute natural gas) biogas to the European gas grid and then for the industry to buy it on contract. The corresponding quantity of gas will then not be available neither for tri-generation nor for the transport sector.
So if the primary choice from the process owner is to use digestible biomass as the energy resource, then the energy carrier will effectively be only one, and that is gaseous fuel.
Since biogas of SNG-quality is indistinguishable from the fossil gas distributed via the gas grid, the end user will see no change at all in the process control and behaviour.